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Imagine entering Best Buy, Circuit City, or your favorite retailer to comparison-shop for a large-screen flat TV. You head to the video department and pace back and forth, inspecting the image quality, pricing, and design of all your choices. If you're lucky, you can switch to DVD or NTSC content. But chances are you'll get only great-looking high-definition content from a special disc player or DVD content. Rarely will you get to watch a cable feed, since it just doesn't look so hotespecially when you're viewing weak NTSC signalsthanks to deinterlacing and scaling artifacts.

Prior to the store visit, you've presumably done research on the Web and asked knowledgeable friends for opinions. But your buying decision still depends strongly on comparative image quality. So in designing our test methodology for this story, we decided to construct our own display showroom in our labs, where we were able to compare image quality across all ten panels reviewed in this story at once.

Co-Founder, ExtremeTech
Ex-Director, PC Magazine Labs
Nick is a founder of the ExtremeTech website. He worked with co-founder Bill Machrone designing the site, staffing up, and getting initial content developed for ET's formal launch on June 12, 2001. Nick was Senior Technical Director of ET until mid-2003, while concurrently performing duties in PC Magazine Labs.
Nick was a technical director in PC Labs from late 1991 through mid-2002, and was Lab Director from mid-2002 until March 2005. Prior to PC Magazine, Nick was in the computer industry...
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